Remembering writer and suffragette Eleanor Kirk
The New Yorker
September 2, 2014
How to Pitch a Magazine (in 1888)
For women writers, Eleanor Kirk’s 1888 guidebook was a way to break into the boys’ club of publishing.
By Paul Collins
Today marks the publication of the ninety-fourth annual edition of “Writer’s Market”—that standby of aspiring writers and the bane of slush-pile-reading interns. A holdout from the time of Underwood typewriters and S.A.S.E.s, the print version of “Writer’s Market” soldiers on in an era of Mediabistro and Submittable. But the creators of the series didn’t invent pitch guides. Credit for that belongs to a nineteenth-century suffragette working from her Brooklyn apartment. Largely forgotten today, Eleanor Kirk was “the most pronounced of the women’s rights women,” as the New York Herald put it in 1870—a firebrand spoken of in the same breath as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Widowed twice before she turned forty, left with five children to support, Kirk cast aside her old name, Eleanor Maria Easterbrook Ames, and reinvented herself as a sharp-elbowed reporter for the New York Standard—“Not an erasure, not an addition, no alterations,” she once warned a meddling editor.
Her first fame, though, came through the short-lived Working Women’s Association, started by Anthony and Stanton in 1868. Kirk quickly asserted herself in the group. “With one end of a Rob Roy shawl thrown defiantly across her bosom … [she] asked if ladies who were not working women should dictate [the W.W.A.’s] constitution and officers. Eleanor threw a withering glance in the direction of the elegant ladies with gold mounted glasses,” the Herald reported. (“And I must confess that I don’t like this wholesale condemnation of men that I hear every night,” she added at another meeting.) It was no surprise when the outspoken Kirk was tapped, the following year, to succeed Anthony as president of the association—but she shocked the group by turning down the post. “MRS. KIRK’S HAND GRENADE,” a headline in the Sun read the next day. Anthony pleaded in vain with her; Kirk was, she warned, “making the great mistake of her life.” (And maybe she was; the group went on to form part of the nucleus of the National Women Suffrage Association.)
Kirk’s dilemma, fittingly enough, was that she really was a working woman. Though she continued lecturing on behalf of women workers and in favor of suffrage, and even served as the organization’s secretary for a time, she could not afford to lead the movement. Instead, she supported her household over the next two decades by writing brash columns in which she dispensed parenting advice and covered the latest goings-on in New York City’s salons and courtrooms (and, in one case, at a speed-typewriting tournament). During the same period, she also penned a novel of divorce rights (“Up Broadway”) and a stage comedy (“Flirtation”). By the eighteen-eighties, Kirk’s columns were in syndication, reaching millions of women through a hundred and fifty newspapers nationwide: “SHE IS BOTH PARAGRAPHIC AND BREEZY,” as one slightly mystifying Dallas Morning News headline promised. Working and travelling were especially important to Kirk, and she directed much of her ire at the absurdities of constrictive Victorian clothing. It was “the plain and positive duty of every woman” to shorten her skirt; Kirk urged her readers to take up biking and mountain climbing, and snapped that anyone lacking the courage to wear bloomers “would do well to remain in her rocking chair on the piazza and solace herself with her embroidery, novel, and pug dog.”
Kirk, who often pushed for newsrooms to employ more women, was confounded by questions from those who couldn’t break into writing. This inspired a slim volume, one so odd that Kirk had to publish and sell it from her home at 786 Lafayette Avenue, in Brooklyn: “Periodicals that Pay Contributors; to which Is Added a List of Publishing Houses.” The year was 1888. “I want to help the girls who feel they can write if they have a little encouragement,” Kirk later explained in one of her columns. “I know what uphill work it is.”.... MORE at link provided above.
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